Thursday, May 7, 2015

man-pages-4.00 is released

Version numbers for the current man-pages release had been getting uncomfortably high, so that I'd been thinking about bumping to a new major version for a while, and now that the Linux kernel has just done that, it seems an opportune moment do likewise. So, here we have it: man-pages-4.00, my 166th man-pages release.

The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

This release resulted from patches, bug reports,and  comments from over 50 contributors. As well as a large number of minor fixes to around 90 man pages, the more significant changes in man-pages-4.00 include the following:

  • A new get_phys_pages(3) page by William Woodruff documents the get_phys_pages() and get_avphys_pages() library functions.
  • A new loop(4) page by Usr Thuermann and me documents the loop device.
  • The xattr(7) page has been added. This is not a new page, but an import from the attr project. After discussions with Andreas Grünbacher, maintainer of that project,we concluded that the best home for this page was in man-pages, since it is primarily documenting kernel details. Along the way, the page was renamed from attr(5) to xattr(7), a name that is more consistent with the system calls (setxattr(), etc.) that are employed with extended attributes. (A link file has been added, so that references to acl(5) will continue to work.)
  • The resolver(3) page now includes descriptions for a number of additional resolver functions.